Half marathon time-lapse

Details

Published: 11 June 2017

Last Updated: 29 June 2017

On sunday 11 juni 2017 I decided to go for it. My first half marathon.

As part of my Dead Man Running story, I wanted to do something special - like a time-lapse movie of this performance.The action cam I used (Denver Act-8030W) has time-lapse functionality. I knew this trip was going to be way over 2 hours, so I had to carry an extra power supply. Previous tests with the time-lapse function where promising, so i decided to go with the photo time-lapse function set to 3 seconds per photo.

The harnas that i used for the camera had to be worn on the outside of my clothes. That bothered me a lot, so I had to make some adjustments to the design. I went for a solution with strong magnets. Hurray, i made it to the finish in 1 hours and 45 minutes. Ok, maybe not the best time, but certainly not bad for the first time. After downloading all pictures to my computer, all 3300 of them, I got to work on the time-lapse movie. But...it was not ok. The movie was shaking like hell, it was almost impossible to watch. So i tried several tools to stabilise to pictures in the movie, but they all failed. Then I noticed while putting my finger against the screen pointing at my shadow in the movie, every 4th picture the shadow would return almost at the same place, so the solution was to take every 4th picture. I ended up with 940 pictures instead of 3300 While the movie is more stabilised this way I lost a lot of details by removing so many pictures. This got me thinking that I want to improve this for the next big challenge. In order to stabilise the recording, I got to get my hands on a so called gimbal. These things are expensive so let's try to make one from scrap. Interested? Keep in touch...